Humans are social by nature and hence they constantly seek relationships to survive and flourish. Building a strong relationship is thus very important but when it comes to seek relationship in the office environment it is quiet opposite than what we experience in our everyday lives. Although strong relationship is required but if you want to broaden your scope of knowledge then developing weak ties will be far more beneficial than the strong ties. Earlier, before the advent of internet and social networking concept everyone believed that strong ties are the way to go for getting knowledge. But now with the success of social networking sites like facebook, twitter and linkedin it has become clear that weak ties are paramount to increase the scope of knowledge.
A paper published by sociologist Mark Granovetter in 1973, "The Strength of Weak Ties” gave us insights of what actually this weak tie can do and how it can act as a bridge to get access and information, which could not be otherwise been possible. Strong ties require lot of effort to maintain whereas for weak ties no such effort is required. When we look at facebook, twitter and linkedin we realize that most of our friends, followers or connections are those whom we don’t know directly rather they may be friend’s associates or someone our friend knows. We can make use of this weak tie to our benefits in many ways for instance in Linkedin you can send message to find new job or you can also request your connection for an introduction. It is said that we cannot maintain more than 150 stable social relationships this number is called as Dunbar’s Number but with weak ties you don’t have to worry about the numbers.
Weak ties play a very important role in organization collaboration and today’s Enterprise collaboration software like uKnowva helps provide such platform to build weak ties. With Internet age fast evolving it becomes paramount to deploy a platform at the workplace with features like activity stream, profile creation, internal idea management and blogs to help form weak ties with the colleague.
